This speech will be delivered in Strasbourg on Thursday, 08 October, 2009

Intervention Speech for the Cross-Border Internet: Consultation meeting organised by the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 8-9 October 2009
By Dr. Yaman Akdeniz, Associate Professor in Law, Faculty of Law, Istanbul Bilgi University.

It is a great honour to be here today in Strasbourg at the Council of Europe, and to be very close to the European Court of Human Rights. For me, as an academic working in the field of human rights and new media, in particular with regards to legal and policy issues surrounding the Internet since the mid 1990s, the role of both the Council, and the European Court has been crucially important.

Istanbul ? For Turkish internet users, it?s an image that?s becoming increasingly familiar: at many websites, instead of a homepage, what they find is a short notice telling them the site has been blocked by order of law.

YouTube, the popular video sharing website, has been blocked since May of last year after amateurish clips mocking Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey?s founder, were posted on the site. More recently, Turkey?s two largest gay community web sites were blocked, after authorities accused them of promoting prostitution.

The BBC has released new draft editorial guidelines, which include some suggestions for online news as well as for its prolific television and radio output. For the first time, theBBC Trust – the body which aims to represent the public as owners of the corporation – has launched a public consultation on the revised draft, offering licence fee payers the chance to have their say on the standards, which are rewritten every five years.

As net surfers everywhere explore the benefits of interactive sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the Web’s evolutionary wheels continue to turn moving users from the user-centric Web, or Web 2.0, to the semantic web more commonly known as Web 3.0. Delegates at the 2015 Newsroom conference being held in Prague displayed mixed reactions to presentations from three of the digital realm’s top thinkers during the session entitled Personalised news and the semantic Web: what added value for journalism? As many delegates continue to discover Web 2.0 they were taken aback to learn of the next step to the World Wide Web’s development.

Alan Mutter on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, has published a checklist for publications to follow in their attempts to start charging for online news content.
Mutter argues that charging for particular content such as world, national, business, sports and entertainment news is not an option, though perhaps some revenue could be generated from local news if it is of a good enough quality. Niche news publications, such as those in the ‘business to business realm’ could probably charge users for exclusive information, as could those producing exculsive entertainment content. But apart from these publications (which is just about everyone), he says that newspapers need to totally modify their attitude toward the way and the type of content they produce before they can even contemplate trying to sell it.

The Online News Association conference this last weekend was a big success ? the third-straight sold out conference, with more than 750 attendees. A big thanks to everyone who came. You can find fantastic coverage at http://conference.journalists.org/2009conference/ thanks to the student newsroom.

CA ? Social Network Site Privacy: A Comparative Analysis of Six Sites: ?(Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada)
This report was prepared for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner by Jennifer Barrigar, a consultant and researcher with experience in both privacy law and developments in internet technology. It was originally commissioned in late 2008, and a final report was delivered to the Office in February 2009. Some of the observations made in this report may appear outdated or even incorrect. This is certainly the case with Facebook, one social network that has undertaken successive rounds of privacy amendments in 2009. This is not the case with many of the other social networking sites identified by Ms. Barrigar.

by Nestor Bailly

Dan Gillmor has written a column over at guardian.co.uk about standards of journalism practice, his ‘new rules of news,’ that he would enforce if he ran a news organization. Here are a couple of the more interesting suggested guidelines:

Over the past month, I received a significant amount of feedback on my recent MediaShift article, What Will Record Labels Look Like in the Future?. People from all areas of the music industry reached out and shared their feelings on future business models, and strategies for moving forward.